20 Things You Didn't Know About... Computer Hacking

1Hacker originally meant “one who makes furniture with an ax.” Perhaps because of the blunt nature of that approach, the word came to mean someone who takes pleasure in an unconventional solution to a technical obstacle.

3 One of the club’s early programs: code that illuminated lights on the mainframe’s console, making it look like a ball was zipping from left to right, then right to left with the flip of a switch. Voilà: computer Ping-Pong!

4 By the early 1970s, hacker “Cap’n Crunch” (a.k.a. John Draper) had used a toy whistle to match the 2,600-hertz tone used by AT&T’s long-distance switching system. This gave him access to call routing (and brief access to jail).

5 Before they struck it rich, Apple founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs made and sold “blue boxes,” electronic versions of Draper’s whistle.

6 Using a blue box, Wozniak crank-called the Pope’s residence in Vatican City and pretended to be Henry Kissinger.

7 Hacking went Hollywood in the 1983 movie WarGames, about a whiz kid who breaks into a Defense Department computer and, at one point, hi­jacks a pay phone by hot-wiring it with a soda can pull-ring.